Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
The Neural Archive is a repository of publications collected by us during the years. Browse our collection here.
Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.
The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.
Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.
YesNo by Timo Kahlen feels like “traditional” net art, a well crafted stuck webpage for the user’s aural and clickable enjoyment.
The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”
Harsh Noise Wally, is a sophisticated mashup mixing strips of Wally, the lazy and cynic colleague of Dilbert with some epic noise music extreme attitudes. Well conceived and assembled.
Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400
GoPro ancestors in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly sport and movie persons like F1 driver Jackie Stewart, Bob Sinclair and Steve McQueen.
The feedback we get from a video, or any cinematic artifact is continuous, as every frame reaching our retina alters the state of our brain and our interpretation of the source material. In Simulacra by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, there is a →
CD – Gruenrekorder
The field recordings of Mosaïque Mosaic, collected by Christina Kubisch & Eckehard Güther, were captured in Cameroon and selected on the basis of their ability to evoke the sensibility of this African region. Specific workshops were held →
The latest edition of the Olympic Winter Games held in Sochi will perhaps be better remembered for the international controversy surrounding the racial and homophobic (im)positions of the Russian Government than for the sporting events and the athletes involved. Reports of →
book + CD – Amalgamated Torso and Such
This album booklet is actually a fanzine photocopy and in its first pages the album is literally defined as “a compilation of fluid contributions from various practitioners of the noise arts compiled →
Already from its name, which recalls “Boundless Informant”, the software used by NSA for analyzing and visualizing data, Open Informant by Superflux manifests itself as a project that intends to investigate the subject of state surveillance. The work consists of →
CD – Melange Edition
This five-track record has an immediate and powerful impact. Code of Silence opens with “jiwa jiwa”, whose unhurried tonal development is coldly resonant, super-synthetic, rarefied and industrial. The author has indicated that she is exploring the →
Uniformbooks, ISBN-13: 978-1910010013, English, 200 pages, 2013, UK
After the seminal “In The Field”, Carlyle and Lane have edited another remarkable anthology of texts, this time focused on the (not so simple) act of listening. Known physical properties are able →
Breathing new life back into obsolete and forgotten technology in media arts projects has seen a surge of increased activity in recent years. A kind of technological remix culture combined with a DIY hacking mentality has facilitated the resurrection of →
CD – Amalgamated Torso And Such
DIY devices, abrasive frequencies, heavy sounds, noisy and persistent; here are 74 minutes of absolute experimental anarchy spawned by devices powered by two nine-volt batteries and made from parts available in normal electronic supplies →
Intellect Ltd, ISBN-13: 978-1841507088, English, 144 pages, 2013, UK
Many philosophical questions raised by the nanoscale (or nanoscopic scale, where the nanometer is a billionth of a meter) are connected to its intrinsically challenging nature: it represents a shift to →
Pirate radio stations know that if they cannot keep their gear on the move, their days are counted. Locating the source of radio transmissions is a technique developed during the First World War and still employed by law enforcement agencies →
DVD-ROM, Kvitnu, 2013, Ukraine
Binmatu is a project by Slovak sound artist Jonáš Gruska, musician, visual performer, founder of the LOM label and developer of open source computer instruments and artistic software. So it’s understandable why this dvd has been →
Black Dog Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1908966230, English, 304 pages, 2013, UK
One commonality in the different definitions of “postdigital” is that it is definitively getting rid of the material/immaterial dichotomy introduced in the early stages of digital. This dichotomy has →
In Self-Portrait, a new media installation by Bostjan Čadež presented in December 2013 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, a computer placed on a chair in front of a mirror looks at its mirrored image through a webcam. →
